Improving the translation environment for professional translators

When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side. This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project

Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment (SCATE): Highlights

We present the highlights of the now finished 4-year SCATE project. It was completed in February 2018 and funded by the Flemish Government IWT-SBO, project No. 130041

Stock engines, language coverage, and the cloud : what's in translation in the near future?"

Stock engines, language coverage, and the cloud : what's in translation in the near future?" Recent developments in the professional translation world have made clear that technology becomes more and more prominent, and that the translator is confronted with new and powerful tools. How to deal with this challenge? How to make the most of using these high performance technologies and integrate them with other skills? And what about the cloud? Is the future of translation in the cloud? This presentation will highlight some of the most recent trends and some challenges for translator training.status: publishe

Language policy and planning: the issues of creating language for special purposes versus domain loss”

Language policy and planning : the issues of creating language for special purposes versus domain loss. Terminology is about the linguistic designations for concepts and objects in a given subject area, but it is also concerned with other units such as collocations, lexical combinations or phraseologies in actual use, which are all part of specialized languages and discourse. Ontologies are the most important way to describe the relation between concepts and to model a conceptual system. Through ontologies, we can make terminologies operational. Terminology and the study of language for special purposes is situated on the intersection of various fields of knowledge (logic, ontology, linguistics, information science, language policy, languageplanning..) Terminological units can be seen as : linguistic entities in linguistics concept entities in ontology and cognitive sciences communicative units in the more restricted framework of scientific & technical discourse the cognitive dimension : examines the concept relations and how the concepts constitute structured sets of knowledge units or concept systems in every area of human knowledge, as well as the representation of concepts by definitions and terms the linguistic dimension : examines existing linguistic forms as well as potential linguistic forms that can be created in order to name new concepts the communicative dimension : examines the use of terms as a means of transferring knowledge to different categories of recipients in a variety of communicative situations and covers the activities of compilation, processing and dissemination of terminological data in the form of specialized dictionaries, glossaries or terminological databases, etc. (Sager 1990) This paper deals with the challenges encountered in the creation of terminology for specialized, technical and scientific communication, and focuses especially on the issues of language planning and language policy as presented in the Unesco guidelines for Terminology Policies. Languages that do not develop new terminologies will suffer domain loss in specialized communication.status: publishe

Taal en variatie. Variatie en taal. Het INT als schatkamer van alle taalmaterialen.

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Rekenen op taal. Hoeveel kost taal en wat is de impact op onze economie?

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Taaldiversiteit in economisch perspectief. Is er ruimte voor regiolecten en dialecten?

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Clarin, Clariah and Dariah: towards a full infrastructure for digital humanities in Europe

In this presentation we will discuss the needs for a language community to have extensive language resources and a digital language infrastructure for the development of all types of smart computer applications. We expand on how an open resource digital language infrastructure is made available for the Low Countries through the Dutch Language Institute. Such an infrastructure facilitates the development of a large number of technological applications. In 2011, META, the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance published a number of white papers discussing the benefits offered by Language Technology and the actions that need to be taken to develop basic tools and data for each language depending on the factors such as the complexity of the respective language, the size of its community, and the existence of active research centers in this area. Language technology is used to develop smart software systems designed to handle human language and is therefore often referred to as “human language technology”. Human language technology (HLT) links language to various forms of knowledge. Main application areas of language technology are a.o. language checking, web search, speech interaction, and machine translation. A large number of smart computer applications rely heavily on speech and language data; we name a few: spelling correction, authoring support, computer assisted language learning, information retrieval, information extraction, text summarization, question answering, speech recognition, speech synthesis,.. The situation of every language concerning language technology needs to be supervised. The Metanet consortium stresses the need for continuous development of language technology resources and use them to drive forward research, innovation and development. The need for large amounts of data and the extreme complexity of language technology systems makes it vital to develop a new infrastructure and a more coherent research organisation to support greater sharing and cooperation. We are now moving one step ahead: from the CLARIN centers for language infrastructure and the Clariah projects, Dariah is now expanding strongly as an infrastructure for the wider arts and humanities researchers working with computational methods. As such, young researchers and PhD students will be able to train in research in digital humanities, and a wealth of new applications will become possible.status: publishe